Latest Writing and Book News
Dear friends,
I hope you’ve not been feeling the same dread as I’ve felt for the last couple of weeks post-election. I try to keep in mind something that Arundhati Roy said to me in 2017 when I interviewed her for the SF Chronicle about The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. I was thinking about some unfair reviews that claimed the book didn’t focus enough on small things (when it’s about the long historical slide of India away from secular democracy!), and so I asked, “In a time when so much is urgent, do the small things still matter?” She said—and it was maybe the most meaningful moment interviewing an author I’ve had so far—“Yes! They matter more than ever. It’s the accumulation of small things that make big things.”
Here are some of the 2024 books I’ve written about and very strongly recommended in profiles and reviews over the last nine months or so of being incommunicado and working on my own novel. The starred ones are those that have endured for me, so what I think is the best or else most exciting-to-me of my favorites:
Julia Alvarez, The Cemetery of Untold Stories
Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s The Tree Doctor
*Porochista Khakpour’s Tehrangeles
*Jonathan Lethem’s Cellophane Bricks
*Danzy Senna’s Colored Television
*Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise
Laura Marris’s, The Age of Loneliness
I also have my own news. How We Know Our Time Travelers had good trade reviews! The ones that I love are at Publishers Weekly and Foreword Reviews. The latter, by Rebecca Foster, is probably the most stellar eagle-eyed thing about my fiction I’ve ever read. There are strong differences about this within the world of criticism, but there’s something to be said about reviews that are signed by their specific critics.
If you’re in the Bay Area, hope you’ll come out to one of two book launch events for my short story collection How We Know Our Time Travelers.
-- Green Apple Books on Park (Richmond/Inner Sunset) launch w/the wonderful novelist Nayomi Munaweera
1231 9th Ave, San Francisco, CA 94122
Wednesday, December 4, 2024 at 7 pm. Snacks! Hopefully wine or prosecco! RSVP here.
--Backyard Brew café-book party at 444 S California Ave Palo Alto, CA 94301 with multi-gifted novelist and poet and journalist Devi Laskar! Hosted by both the café and my brilliant friend-since-childhood Mila Zelkha who is doing amazing things for Bay Area workers with the nonprofit Manzanita Works (which I’m doing a little consulting for).
Sunday, December 8, 2024 from 5-6:30 pm
Snacks and delicious mocktails (for sale)! Maybe a raffle!
Books for sale, likely in collaboration w/Kepler’s Bookstore (if you like, preorder here – support the independent bookstores—a small but in my opinion, tangible line of defense against homogeneity and misinformation in the coming years)
RSVP to my email (anitafelicelli AT gmail.com), if possible.
Finished a revised rewrite of a dystopian novel, and once that’s fully off my plate, it’s on to a new book set back in the ‘90s. My new obsession is whales—maybe something's brewing there. We went to San Juan Island this past summer, and I now feel like I want to move there and live at Lime Kiln Park to wait for the orcas. But then again, its been an incredible migration here, too. I went on a really great trip with Monterey Bay Whale Watch, which is run by a marine biologist, as one of my research trips/method-acting-for-writing things and whew! More than twenty humpbacks and orcas right up to the side of a fairly small boat.
Sending good thoughts for all of us experiencing post-election grief to feel better soon. Drop me a line through my gmail and say hello! It has been kind of lonely out here in terms of writing and booktalk, lately.
—Anita
